Last Tango in Paris: Dark Moments Together

Maria Schneider and Marlon Brando. Photo: United Artists The scene in Last Tango in Paris where Marlon Brando anally rapes Maria Schneider was controversial at the time of the release…

Andrei Rublev: Before the Tsars

Photo: Mosfilm Andrei Tarkovsky’s wildly ambitious second film was shown in a cinema in 1966. The audience seemed to like it, but the Soviet censors refused to approve the epic…

Happiest Season 

Harper (Mackenzie Davis) is spending Christmas together with her family and her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart)… but on the journey home she tells Abby that she hasn’t come out to…

Muriel’s Wedding 

Muriel (Toni Collette), a bullied, ABBA-loving young woman in a small town, steal $12,000 to join her ”friends” on an island vacation. The director’s feature film debut was an international…

The Christmas Chronicles Part Two 

Kate (Darby Camp) comes to the North Pole and meets Santa Claus (Kurt Russell) again, but they realize that she was being used by a resentful former elf (Julian Dennison)…

The Last Emperor: The Chosen One

Richard Vuu. Photo: Columbia In the late 1980s, the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci was decidedly an international filmmaker, having made movies in France and the United States. That year he…

Hillbilly Elegy

When future Vice President J.D. Vance’s memoir was published, it was hotly debated; many believed he generalized too much about the white working class, using his personal experiences of one…

Seven Samurai: Another Battle, Another Loss

Photo: Toho I saw this, the most famous of Akira Kurosawa’s movies, for the first time twenty years ago while studying journalism. More than three hours long, Seven Samurai is…

Rebecca: A Haunted House

Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson. Photo: United Artists As Alfred Hitchcock was making his first Hollywood movie, producer David O. Selznick tried his best to influence the British director. Selznick…